Why most men with low testosterone levels feel like crap meanwhile women seem to do just fine with their even lower testosterone levels?
In: Biology
Why do women in menopause feel like crap, when men do just fine with even lower estrogen levels?
In general men or women get used to having high levels of at least one sex hormone. For men that’s testosterone, for women estrogen (and to a lesser extent progesterone). It all depends of what our body has adapted too.
But in both cases the removal of the hormone causes physical, and mental changes that are not enjoyable. It’s almost like a withdrawal from a drug or medication our body has begun to depend on.
The body does not adapt well to not having sex hormones. It needs either a high testosterone or a high oestrogen level to function, and a cis man with low testosterone is low on both.
These two hormones do a lot more than just sex characteristics: they regulate where fat is stored, how muscles are rebuilt, and even how soft cell walls are. They play a part in blood pressure, migraine risk and bone density. And of course, your mood and how your body deals with emotions.
Tl;dr the depression of low testosterone is but a symptom of a whole array of issues caused by too little hormones. Women have oestrogen to fulfil those duties instead.
Women aren’t designed to need testosterone, likewise men aren’t designed to need oestrogen. If you put diesel in a petrol car and petrol in a diesel car neither is going to work particularly well.
Testosterone itself is a steroid. It numbs pain, it accelerates healing and tissue growth, it opens the body for change and makes men more adaptable and more tolerable of harsh conditions. It makes our muscles significantly larger and stronger, it makes our fat more insulative, and it makes our skin thicker and more cellulose keeps our skin tight and less prone to cellulite (blobby fat deposits poking through the skin). When your testosterone levels get really high that’s when things get really weird: your senses get a lot sharper, your aggression can be set on a hair trigger but confidence goes through the roof, your body more efficiently processes food so more fat and muscle and energy is produced and less is “wasted”, and your sex drive really takes off.
Compare that to a man with low testosterone: more body fat, physically weaker, less efficient metabolism, duller senses, higher sensitivity to pain and the cold, slower, insecure (less self-confident would probably be a better phrase), easier to wound and bruise, wounds heal a lot slower, poorer memory and mental focus, less able to socialise, and has less sex.
Both sexes have specialised sex organs and hormones that keep everything running and testosterone really does cover everything. A lot of men make huge sweeping changes in their diet and lifestyle in order to maximise their own testosterone production because it’s so important to how our body works, especially when you get older and the body’s ability to make testosterone plummets. A woman will likely never have more testosterone in her system at any age than a man does when he’s in his 50s. Too much testosterone in a woman can cause severe physical deformities, pain, and sterility as her body changes.
Women have significantly more estrogen receptors throughout their body, while men have significantly more androgen receptors throughout theirs. Studies show that the transcriptional morphology of these receptors differs between genders, and estrogen and testosterone can have opposite effects between them when it comes to physical, neurological, and sexual function.
However, despite this, the two hormones still have positive benefits for both sexed, it’s just that our genetics and epigenetic calls for different concentrations of these hormones to be produced to fit our hormonal environment. Estrogen is important for bone density. While testosterone is important for cognitive function. These benefits apply to both genders.
I’ll give you a hint as to why testosterone is lower nowadays; with how much xenoestrogens are within the air we breathe, and the water we drink, and the food we eat, women are generally doing much better than men, and have more ‘ideally’ developed secondary sexual characteristics than men did. Men had broader shoulders, redder and thicker skin, more easily developed muscles, and more collagen/thicker joints 100 years ago, due to the absence of xenoestrogens which inhibit the androgen receptor directly, and the common presence of unhealthy, yet testosterone/DHT-raising activities such as smoking tobacco all day.
I hope I put that as clearly and as simply for you as possible. I’m studying biochemistry at university and want to go into the study of medicine. This is something I myself have thought about almost daily. And I’ll add this, if you are asking this because you are depressed, I highly recommend boosting your testosterone by eating healthy, exercising daily, and avoiding xenoestrogens as much as possible.
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